“What band is this?” I ask as I roam around the room, examining all the guitars on the walls.
She shrugs as she plops down in the chair behind the desk and collects a guitar propped against the wall. “The front of the CD cover says The Cranberries. I just randomly picked it. Thought a surprise would be fun.” She strums a few notes. “I’m wondering if it was one of my mother’s CDs, though.” Her lips part as if she’s going to sing, and her eyes drift shut. But instead of belting out the lyrics, she plays the notes while uttering the words under her breath. When she opens her eyes again, she looks nervous, which is strange. Lyric never, ever looks nervous.
“You okay?”
She nods, setting the guitar aside. “Yeah, just seeing if I could do it around you.”
“Do what around me?”
She shrugs as she opens a drawer. “Sing.”
I wish I could help her get over her fear, but unlike what she did for me, I can’t just buy her a nightlight.
“What were you whispering to Aunt Lila about this morning?” she casually asks as she sifts through a stack of papers on the desk.
“Nothing important.” I plop down in a swivel chair in front of the desk and start spinning in circles.
“I heard you say something about your brother and sister.” She reads something on one of the papers, but I can tell she’s pretending, worried she’s crossing a line. “I didn’t know you had a brother and sister.”
“I did … before …” I pick up the pace, whirling the chair around and around until I’m so dizzy I feel like I’m going to hurl. “My brother is a year older than me and my sister is a year younger.”
“And you haven’t seen them since you had to leave your home?”
“No.”
“Does it make you sad, that you all had to leave your home and now you don’t get to see them?”
I dig my heels into the floor and stop the chair before I actually do end up vomiting. She’s watching me intently, waiting for me to answer, with a drop of apprehension in her eyes.
“I don’t miss my old … home at all,” I utter quietly. “It wasn’t even a home … at least, from what I can remember … but I do miss my brother and sister. That’s why I asked Mrs. Gregory if she could find stuff out about them—or at least where they are.”
Her head angles to the side and she looks so lost. “You said from what you can remember.”
“Huh?” My voice is thick with emotion. Just talking about this is surfacing unwanted memories that are supposed to be forgotten.
“Just barely, you said, ‘from what I can remember.’” She shifts in her seat, leaning back. “Can you not remember your old home?”
Seeing no other way out of this than to lie to her—which I won’t do—I nod. “Some of my memories are foggy.”
“Does Mrs. Gregory know about this?”
“Vaguely. I think social services and the therapist I’ve been going to told her some details.” I clench my fists as my chest starts to constrict.
Links of metal wrapped around my wrist and brain.
Driving me insane.
Begging me to cave.
They whispered they knew the truth.
Marked it forever on my flesh.
Told me to give in.
To surrender.
But I couldn’t.
I blink from my thoughts and massage my wrists.
“Maybe I could help you find them,” she says, thrumming her fingers on top of the desk.
“Who?”
“Your brother and sister.”
“And how would we do that”—my fingers curl around the armrest, desperate to hold onto something, because I feel like I’m about to have a panic attack—“when Mrs. Gregory couldn’t even find them?”
She slants forward, crossing her arms on top of the desk. “There’s a little thing called the internet, Ayden. We could do some research on our own.”
“You would help me do that?”
“I would help you do anything.”
Even though the concept doesn’t feel possible, I believe her. “Where would we start?”
Her eyes elevate to the ceiling as she contemplates. “You know their last names, right?”
I nod. “My brother’s name is Felix, and my sister’s name is Sadie. Our last names used to be Stephorson, but I’m not sure now if theirs still is, since mine’s changed.”
“Okay, we can start there. And it’d probably help if they had something distinct about them.”
My fingers travel to the homemade tattoo on my side, put there without my permission. “They have the same tattoo as me.”
Her lips part, but no words come out. I’ve shocked Lyric beyond words, which doesn’t seem natural.
“We didn’t choose to get them,” I mumble, completely clueless why I’m telling her this. “They were put on us, from what I can remember.”
She sucks her bottom lip into her mouth, as if she’s trying to physically restrain herself from asking.
“What happened to you?” she finally asks.
I grind my teeth so forcefully it actually hurts my jaw. “When I was younger, we were taken by these … people who had these really strange beliefs. They put the tattoos on us.” My voice quivers almost as intensely as my heart as I speak of the day my mother betrayed her three children. It’s the same day that my memories start to break apart into charred fragments that barely make sense.